Looking at LINQ

I've been digging through the discussion of LINQ in the Albahari brothers' C# 4.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference, and it has cleared up a number of points for me:

1. At a compiler level, LINQ is a series of transformations done to expressions that begin with FROM and end with SELECT or GROUP BY.  These transformations turn free text queries into extension methods.  For example, var query = from A in aList select A.ToUpper() is transformed by the compiler into var query = aList.Select(a => a.ToUpper()). But, and this is a key point, the implementation of the methods is not determined.  You determine the implementation by the namespaces you include; you could write your own implementation of Select, Where, etc.  
2. LINQ expressions provide access to local objects or external data sources.  Although the same syntax is used, the implementation is fundamentally different.  

   • Local LINQ expressions are executed through a series of IEnumerator MoveNext actions, moving from right to left.  For example, with an expression like aList.Where(...).Select(..).OrderBy(...), when the OrderBy receives a MoveNext command from calling code, and in turn issues a MoveNext to the Select method, and so on until the Where method calls MoveNext on the original collection enumerator.
   • External data sources, such as SQL Server, receive the LINQ query as a single SQL query request. A series of OrderBy/ThenBy clauses, for example, are transmitted to the database as elements of a single ORDER BY clause.
3. The query expression is implemented using the Decorator pattern, where steps in logic are applied over each other in successive layers.  Each LINQ step has a reference to an IEnumerable collection and an expression to apply to the collection. with each step in the query containing a link to an IEnumable collection and the logic to apply to it, in a sequence that the Albaharis aptly compare to a set of Russian dolls.